Cloudflare Workers vs Netlify
Pricing
Cloudflare Workers: Free tier (100,000 requests/day), paid from $5/mo
Netlify: Free tier, Pro from $19/mo
Description
Cloudflare Workers: Serverless platform for running JavaScript, TypeScript, Python or Rust code and full-stack apps on Cloudflare's global network
Netlify: All-in-one platform for web projects with serverless functions, forms, and identity
Pros
- The free plan includes 100,000 requests a day, and requests to static assets are free and unlimited
- The paid plan starts at $5/month with 10 million requests and 30 million CPU milliseconds included
- No cold starts, and you pay for CPU time, not for time spent waiting on network calls
- Git-push deploys with preview URLs for every branch
- Built-in form handling and auth: no third-party services needed for basics
- Strong community with lots of templates, plugins, and tutorials
Cons
- Only a subset of Node.js APIs is supported, so some npm packages won't run
- The free plan allows 10 ms of CPU time per request
- 100GB bandwidth limit on free tier, which can run out with moderate traffic
- 300 build minutes/month on free tier get eaten up by large sites
- Pricing jump from free to $19/mo is steep for the features you get
Details
Workers runs your code in Cloudflare’s data centres in more than 330 cities, close to your users. It handles APIs, full-stack apps built with React, Vue or Next.js, scheduled jobs and webhooks, and it connects to Cloudflare’s databases, storage and queues through bindings.
Cloudflare’s documentation for Pages now says to start new projects on Workers, and calls Workers its primary platform for building applications.
The paid plan is $5 a month plus any usage beyond the included amounts, and requests for static files are never charged. Check that your dependencies run on the Workers runtime before you commit, since it is not a full Node.js environment.
Netlify pioneered the git-push deployment workflow and still does it well. Connect your repo, push code, get a live site. The built-in extras (form submissions, identity/auth, serverless functions) mean you can build a surprisingly complete app without bolting on extra services.
The free tier is solid for getting started, but watch the bandwidth and build minutes. A content-heavy site with images can blow through 100GB in a busy month. If you are building a static site or Jamstack app and want everything in one place, Netlify is a reliable choice. If unlimited bandwidth matters more, check Cloudflare Pages.
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